Have a suggestion for a topic or speaker for RailsConf 2009? Leave your suggestion here:

Rails and legacy databases — tips and tricks to play nice together when you can’t 0wnz0r the database

Coding Dojo – participants solve a software problem together – format is described in detail at http://codingdojo.org/ – essentially, participants take turns pair programming in front of the group with structured commentary/feedback allowed – this is an absolutely fantastic way for people to get a chance to see (and learn from) how other people work and think moment to moment – something we rarely get from presentations.

Open Source Project – the Agile conference has a room set aside where anyone can come in and sit down and pair program on a real project for a non-profit that might not have the money to pay for such development. Requires selecting a worthy project and setting aside a room with 5 to 10 pairing stations.

Intro to Rails tutorial – Spend three hours getting your head around MVC, Ruby/Rails differences, what files are where, etc. to get newbies on board and ready to dive in to the sessions. This could be a walk through of the example apps in AWDWR (maybe the PragProg guys would want to host it?), or any kind of building a basic app. Lots of people come to RailsConf without having been a part of the culture for long, and providing a basic on-ramp to the deeper level topics would be a great service.

Hack on rails session: whomever wants to all get together and either hack on rails separately (for performance or whatever), or all work on optimizing one single project to get it to go as fast as conceivably possible. Or on someone’s hobby, whatever.

You can give you topic ideas here (http://railsconf.uservoice.com) and everyone can vote up the best ones. I’m trying to find a way to get through to the O’Reilly people to get this officially sanctioned (we’d be happy to give them a free promo version) but it’s got to be better than using a wiki. If you can help please email rich_at_uservoice_com